Lebanon Religious

His voice choked with emotion, Lebanese President Amin Gemayel delivered a farewell address to his countrymen last week. "I leave the presidency today worried and filled with anxiety," he declared. "Today should have been a festival in which we rejoiced over the election of a new President. But the people of war were stronger than peace."

At midnight Thursday, Gemayel's six-year presidential term expired. With Lebanon's fractious Christians and Muslims unable to agree on a candidate to succeed him, Gemayel asked a fellow Christian, army commander Michel Aoun, to head a transitional government of six military officers. The maneuver failed, however, because the three Muslim appointees refused to participate.

The fight over succession really began in mid-August, just before the scheduled parliamentary election, when former President Sulieman Franjieh, 78, a close friend of Syrian President Hafez Assad, announced his candidacy. Assad, whose 40,000 troops in Lebanon reinforce his claim to be the country's dominant power broker, has been pressing for political reforms that would ensure a more equitable distribution of influence between Christians and Muslims. Muslims constitute an estimated 55% of the population. By tradition, the President has always been a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the National Assembly a Shi'ite. Fearful that Franjieh would give in to Assad's wishes, the pro-Israeli Lebanese Forces, the joint Christian militias led by Samir Geagea, refused to support him.

During Gemayel's tumultuous tenure, the presidency has been reduced to little more than a symbol of Lebanese sovereignty. Nonetheless, most Lebanese would rather preserve the symbol than suffer a relapse into violence and anarchy. As tension mounted last week, gunmen once again fired mortars and machine guns across the "green line" separating Christian and Muslim Beirut. Renewed fighting between the rival Shi'ite Muslim organizations -- Amal, supported by Syria, and the Islamic fundamentalist Hizballah, backed by Iran -- is also a prospect. Last week three Amal militia commanders were killed in an ambush south of Beirut, presumably by Hizballah gunmen.

As if all this were not bad enough, Syria's campaign to achieve national unity in Lebanon, a goal the U. S. supports, is also being challenged by Iraq, which is determined to exact revenge against Assad for his support of Iran during the gulf war. Syria claims that Iraq is already funneling money and arms to, of all people, the Lebanese Forces, thereby encouraging the right- wing Christians in their resistance to Assad's reforms.